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Highlights:
Our Deepest Fears | Living Wills Can Fail | Surrogates Can Let You Down | A Legal Peaceful Choice | Why Caring Advocates

A Legal Peaceful Choice explains in detail, how you can overcome present and future challenges to avoid prolonged and unnecessary suffering at the end of life. Whether you are concerned about yourself, a loved one, or both – if you act on the information provided in this book, you will maximize the chance that your reasonable last wishes will be honored in a legal way so that you can affect a peaceful transition.

The book is organized around two dozen critical but infrequently asked questions abbreviated i-FAQs. Their ultimate goal is to instruct you exactly how you can successfully accomplish these tasks, which we call the FOUR KEYS:

1. To ensure that your competency will never become an issue, ask a physician, a psychiatrist, or a psychologist, to document that you possess the mami to ental capacity to make medical decisions around the time you create your Advance Directive;
   
   
2. To prevent any “interested party” from second guessing what you really wanted, you should clearly and convincingly explain the reasons you want to choose Voluntary Refusal of Food and Fluid. This should be done in writing or by an audio/video recording in the Treatment Directive part of your Advance Directive, which is also called your Living Will;
   
   
3. To select an effective advocate for your last wishes, discuss your wishes with a number of people to determine if you can trust them. Then designate a sequence of proxies – sometimes called agents, surrogates, or advocates – in the Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care part of your Advance Directive. Then, if one is not available, the next will serve. Empower your proxies by stating you want their decisions to trump anything you have written, including the Treatment Directive part of your Advance Directive, if there is a conflict;
   
   
4. To prevent possible obstruction of honoring your autonomous last wishes, learn the typical motivations and fears of the large cast of characters – including relatives, doctors, religious leaders, politicians, administrators, and even judges. Also learn how they usually wield their power. Then proactively create a plan to deal with these potential challenges.

The answers to several i-FAQs explain the special urgency to complete your advance planning – if you or someone you love is at risk for a dementing disease like Alzheimer’s. The reason for this urgency is that the opportunity to create a valid Advance Directive must be accomplished while you are still competent, which may not last long. While it is difficult to consider what you would want if you were in the end-stage of such a devastating disease, there are other ways you can benefit from early action. For example, the new drugs that slow down the progression of symptoms of Alzheimer’s seem more effective the earlier you start taking them. Now that special metabolic brain scans can predict the onset of Alzheimer’s disease decades before clinical symptoms appear, it is possible that researchers may someday prove that medications not only slow down the progression of symptoms but also delay their onset.